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Little Love for Labor | The Nation
The question is - why? Why is this happening?
Then of course I wonder if it's easier to lie about history when generations are fragmented like never before.
Little Love for Labor | The Nation
I didnt learn much about the labor movement in high school. At best, it was taught like suffragea long-ago response to long-ago problems. At worst, it was taught like prohibitioncurious, misguided, and painfully anachronistic. Most of the time, my history classes didnt discuss the labor movement at all.
Turns out I wasnt the only one.
Last week the Albert Shanker Institute, a think tank endowed by the American Federation of Teachers, released a report, American Labor in US History Textbooks, documenting the movements compressed portrayal in our major textbooks. It offers a stark assessment: If, while driving to school, students happen to see the bumper sticker: Unions: the Folks Who Brought You the Weekend, that may be more exposure to American labors historic role as a force for social progress than they will ever get in the classroom.
Three historians wrote the report after reviewing the main high school history textbooks of the four chains that together dominate the industry (if youre an American high school student, chances are your textbook is one of them). They found that the textbooks portray strikes as violent, disruptive, and socially negative, while downplaying employers role in instigating violently repressing job actions. Social and economic reforms like the New Deal are credited to visionary politicians and the critical pressure from labor protests is studiously minimized. Social movements for civil rights and womens equality are divorced from labor concerns or participation. With the exceptions of the United Farm Workers organizing and air traffic controllers getting fired, unions virtually disappear from the textbooks after 1960as does workplace injustice.
The question is - why? Why is this happening?
Then of course I wonder if it's easier to lie about history when generations are fragmented like never before.
Little Love for Labor | The Nation